(Hat tip to Dan Satterfield.) A TED talk. Bacteria develop resistence so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided developing new ones is not in their best interest. From the speaker, Maryn McKenna.

Bill McKibben writes about the hope of domestic and home solar, and air-based heat pumps (*), in The New Yorker. I share that hope. Another good book on the same: Mark Schapiro’s Carbon Shock: A tale or risk and calculus … Continue reading →

NASA’s Earth Observing Satellite 1 has been imaging Earth’s surface for a while. That permits long term comparisons. One is dramatic evidence of China’s commitment to zero Carbon energy, in the Gobi Desert. Here are two images from that platform, … Continue reading →

Originally posted on Open Mind: When it comes to temperature at Earth’s surface, with 2014 the hottest year on record and 2015 on pace to exceed even that, things are getting hot for those who deny that global warming is…

Those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms … Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures … The … Continue reading →

Mark Ruffalo on the Daily Show, mentioning, among other things, his keen interest in the 100% campaign, a program, begun by people at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, to switch 100% of all 50 states in … Continue reading →

I could not get through this video with dry eyes. It is as bad as the (great) Cosmos episode on the Permian mass extinction. This is from a couse I am taking, “Denial 101x: The Science of Climate Denial“, from … Continue reading →

Worth a read. More pessimistic than usual from Mr McKibben. If historians someday need to explain how mankind managed to blow the fight against climate change, they need only point to last month’s shareholder meeting at Exxon Mobil headquarters in … Continue reading →

It only uses 46% of the ones it has, as summarized by N. J. Peress. This is underscored, with detailed analysis, by the Quadrennial Energy Review done by the U.S. Department of Energy, available at: Overview Full Report A detailed … Continue reading →

NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’. No doubt there’ll be, as Dr Schmidt says, a howl of protests that the data are “being manipulated”. There’s more discussion by Professor Mann. But, more to the point, it looks like we’re … Continue reading →

Storm-studying scientists have made their next-generation forecasting system available online so the wider weather community can put it to the test. After using the real-time system during short-lived field research campaigns, developers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) … Continue reading →

But if the other advanced nations had a stick — a tariff of 4 percent on the imports from countries not in the “climate club” — the cost-benefit calculation for the United States would flip. Not participating in the club … Continue reading →

Originally posted on Dr Climate: Give anyone working in the climate sciences half a chance and they’ll chew your ear off about CMIP5. It’s the largest climate modelling project ever conducted and formed the basis for much of the IPCC…

Jonah Bloch-Johnson, Ray Pierrehumbert, and Dorian Abbot have a new paper out in Geophysical Research Letters which is pretty exciting, at least for me, having to do with both climate and dynamical systems. They are far from the only ones … Continue reading →

Cape Wind suffers more setbacks, as one commentator said, being “litigated to death”. See the details. And on the good side, the Block Island project proceeds, even if that is a much smaller project. New England, I hope you enjoy … Continue reading →

Kalman filtering and smoothing; dynamic linear models

I have used dlm almost exclusively, except when extreme efficiency was required. Since Jouni Helske's KFAS was rewritten, though, I'm increasingly drawn to it, because the noise sources it supports are more diverse than dlm's. KFAS uses the notation and approaches of Durbin, Koopman, and Harvey.

``The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.''Professor Donald Knuth, 1974